That the last suggestion is probably unconstitutional.
The first is a really good idea.
The second, seems like a good idea but it would be very hard to implement in practice. How do you know which application is "important"? Most businesses cannot get this right, and you expect the patent office to be able to.
Not really. For every lawyer trying to enforce a patent, there is one trying to invalidate it or avoid it.
And I think many lawyers would welcome toughening of USPTO examinations. This would mean that the actual work of writing patent applications will become more challenging and thus more interesting and prestigous.
Re:Boo F*cking Hoo. Get out of my industry.
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
This whole thing is ALL off topic but if we pretend it is true, it does show what the problem with the industry is.
The problem is that managers cannot really appreciate the skill of programming. They treat coders as machines. Thus, people in EB believe that working someone 100 hours a week would benefit them because they will get 100 hours's worth of work from some guy that they are paying a flat salary to. I mean if you payed a flat price for a machine wouldnt you want it working for as long as possible?
They never thing that a guy that has not had sleep for two days is much more likely to introduce some vicious bug that will take another 100 man hours to fix.
"Such a vehicle does not fit into the automotive industry's model of planned obselescence. "
Unfortunately, it does. Batteries wear out you know. In that respect, the electric car is perfect for capitalism.
Main reason auto industry does not like electrics is that they have invested untold billions in their engine an powertrain factories and do not want to scrap them just yet.
Re:the zero emissions fallacy
on
230mph Electric Car
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah but power produced at a power plant (as long as it is not coal) is much usually less polluting per unit of energy than the one produced at your engine. Power plants can use industrial strngth technology to remove pollutants from their exhaust. Also they can afford complex large reactors that capture more energy than car engines.
That does not work for coal powerplants as burning coal is just inherently dirty (and one could say poisonous). This is especially true for Bush's "grandfathered" coal plants which can avoid pollution standards because they are really old (try to figure out the logic behind that reasoning).
So the first thing we should do for the quality of our air is get rid of coal plants. Even if we replace them with nukes, it would be an improvement.
But after coal plants are done away with one can be reasonably sure that the plants will produce less pollution than cars' engines.
There is nothing surprising about his car out accelerating a porsche. Electric cars are fast, because electric motors can have high power compared to size and they are always at their max power (as opposed to gasoline motors that have to reach a certain rpm to get to max power).
However there are problems with electric cars. The batteries are heavy and expensive and as there is no battery technology breakthroughs in sight, they are likely to remain heavy and expensive. And the range is likely to remain limited.
So the Japanese car industry is not in cahoots against this guy. Hybrid cars make much more sense nowadays because they still store the most of their energy in gasoline (as opposed to heavy and expensive batteries) while they allow the electric engine to perform where it is at its best -- when a lot of power is needed and for regenerative braking. Thus the gas engine can be much smaller and operate at max efficiency RPM as opposed to max power rpm.
I would not be so sure that the US car companies arent in a conspiracy, however - they have no good hybrid or electric offerings. GE had a great electric car and decided to kill it, and actually took back all cars from their customers.
I don't mean to hurt your feelings, mr. Prien, but I just want to make sure nobody follows your advice, because they can get in trouble. You are liable for infringement regardless of whether you were aware of the patent or came up with the invantion on your own.
However, the ammount of money that you need to pay may depend on whether you knew about the patent.
Why must you post these stories on the weekend? You have just ruined the saturday of the whole MS marketing department. Now everyone of them has to cancel their plans, log on slashdot and start making posts about how "no OS is secure" and "it is all the users' fault" and "these guys are just trying to scare up some business". And the ever favourite "if Linux was that popular it would have just as many security flaws".
Well that is their job and they do it well, but why must you force them to do it on the weekend? Why can't they be with their families. Even marketoids have lives (I hear).
Re:PC users should read this...
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 1
Some of us already have enough culture without needing the help of various electronic appliances.
This is just silly. You keep forgetting that your closed platform is essentially based on free software (BSD). The only reason it is closed is that those folks at berkley chose not to use the GPL, and thus allowed others to incorporate their code in closed source projects.
Compare OSX whith the previous mac OSs (which in my experience were the most unstable OSs that are commercially available) and then you will see what a difference open source makes and whether open source innovates or not.
As far as the hardware: aside from the IBM cpu most mac hardware is standard off the shelf PC struff. I.e. it is not that closed either. Again, when macs used to have more prprietary hardware they lagged pretty far behind standard PCs in performance.
It is just great that various entities that I hate get together like this. It makes it so much easier for me to avoid them.
Like now -- I am already avoiding iPods like the plague, but wouldn't you know it, soon while avoiding iPods i will also be avoiding U2 and Bono!!! It's like I am getting the U2-Bono avoidance for free!!! Isn't modern marketing great.
And lets face it -- it is a match made in heaven -- both Bono and Apple are overhyped, attention craving, spineless moneysuckers that annihilate true culture any place they throd.
"p.s. the ozone hole is smaller this year. too bad nobody saw fit to put that in the newspaper."
Which surely happened because the industrialized countries stopped using ozone damaging substances. It was a rare case where they actually did listen to the scientists.
Even if the icecaps melt and the earth gets flooded, people would still say "I don't think we have enough evidence" and "The earth used to be this hot a billion years ago, so stop complaining" and "These scientists are just trying to get more research funding", and "It's just a natural phenomenon we can't do anything about it"
It is amazing how people will ignore the whole scientific community in favor of several more pleasant sounding lies told by opportunistic politicians.
"When is the last time the SEC or a Certified Public Accountant identified a case of major corporate fraud before the scam was so far gone it sent the company to court and probably bankruptcy?"
When dod the police catch on a planned murder (or other crime) before it is actually comitted? -- very very rarely. So should we disband the police? Or should we consider that even if they are too late to prevent a crime punishing the criminal provides justice and prevention to other criminals.
The answer is to make the SEC better and not to disband it.
"The SEC was established in the 1920s, yet there have been numerous major stock market crashes and other scams at regular intervals since, and just as many high profile corporate bankruptcies. "
Actually if my memory serves me correctly, it was established in the 30's when securities act was passed. It was established in response to the great depression and there has not been another great depression yet. Furthermore, while there are numerous examples of fraud that is not caught by the SEC, we no longer see the obvious fraud that used to happen during the robber baron ages.
"who do not scrutinize firms in the detail they should"
Scrutinizing firms in higher detail will not necessary prevent fraud. The only thing investors can do is check financial statements for inconsistencies, and the financial statements are entirely created by management. So a dishonest manager only needs to lie consistently in order to escape the deepest scrutiny.
So what is the alternative? That investors become spies and actually go to the company's offices and check on things? Well if you believe that, then 99.999% of current stock owners will not be able to invest properly, which means that the market will crash, capital will become 10x more expensive and our economy will disappear. I would rather have the SEC.
"But they are badly mistaken, the protection offered is nothing but a rubber stamp on an audit report."
Actually the protection offered should be much much greater because auditors are personally liable for any losses resulting from their lies (or screw-ups). And auditors usually have a lot of money. The only problem is that the system is so fraught with corruption, that the auditors responsible for the Enron case, and other similar disasters have been largely able to get away. For the Enron case, the DOJ dragged their feet and let Andersen consulting burn all their documents, destroying all evidence.
Again the solution is getting rid of corruption, not doing away with the system alltogether.
That is a known psycholigical issue. People have problem dealing with very large (or very small) numbers.
Many have learned how to take advantage of that. Take the lottery, if you calculate the actual chances of winning against the prizes, the lottery is usually a bad deal, but most people do not notice this because the chances of winning are very small and the prizes are very big, and people just dont know how to deal with these numebrs.
If you have ever listened to a popular radio station in the US you would know that theyr playlists consist of about a dozen songs that repeat over and over again.
Leave it to MS to copy the most annoying feature of radio.
they probably had their code written by a poor teenage girl in honduras who was getting whipped by a mean guard while she was trying to compile. I can just imagine it:
"more linking errors??? You are going to get it now BITCH!!!!" *whip* *whip*
But I hate it that they always initially refuse these things. It's like you have to make a big deal out of it in order to get your money back. Or, in other words, the store takes advantage of people that are too polite too nice and/or too busy to make a scene.
Slashdot Mirror
That the last suggestion is probably unconstitutional.
The first is a really good idea.
The second, seems like a good idea but it would be very hard to implement in practice. How do you know which application is "important"? Most businesses cannot get this right, and you expect the patent office to be able to.
Not really. For every lawyer trying to enforce a patent, there is one trying to invalidate it or avoid it.
And I think many lawyers would welcome toughening of USPTO examinations. This would mean that the actual work of writing patent applications will become more challenging and thus more interesting and prestigous.
This whole thing is ALL off topic but if we pretend it is true, it does show what the problem with the industry is.
The problem is that managers cannot really appreciate the skill of programming. They treat coders as machines. Thus, people in EB believe that working someone 100 hours a week would benefit them because they will get 100 hours's worth of work from some guy that they are paying a flat salary to. I mean if you payed a flat price for a machine wouldnt you want it working for as long as possible?
They never thing that a guy that has not had sleep for two days is much more likely to introduce some vicious bug that will take another 100 man hours to fix.
"Such a vehicle does not fit into the automotive industry's model of planned obselescence. "
Unfortunately, it does. Batteries wear out you know. In that respect, the electric car is perfect for capitalism.
Main reason auto industry does not like electrics is that they have invested untold billions in their engine an powertrain factories and do not want to scrap them just yet.
Yeah but power produced at a power plant (as long as it is not coal) is much usually less polluting per unit of energy than the one produced at your engine. Power plants can use industrial strngth technology to remove pollutants from their exhaust. Also they can afford complex large reactors that capture more energy than car engines.
That does not work for coal powerplants as burning coal is just inherently dirty (and one could say poisonous). This is especially true for Bush's "grandfathered" coal plants which can avoid pollution standards because they are really old (try to figure out the logic behind that reasoning).
So the first thing we should do for the quality of our air is get rid of coal plants. Even if we replace them with nukes, it would be an improvement.
But after coal plants are done away with one can be reasonably sure that the plants will produce less pollution than cars' engines.
There is nothing surprising about his car out accelerating a porsche. Electric cars are fast, because electric motors can have high power compared to size and they are always at their max power (as opposed to gasoline motors that have to reach a certain rpm to get to max power).
However there are problems with electric cars. The batteries are heavy and expensive and as there is no battery technology breakthroughs in sight, they are likely to remain heavy and expensive. And the range is likely to remain limited.
So the Japanese car industry is not in cahoots against this guy. Hybrid cars make much more sense nowadays because they still store the most of their energy in gasoline (as opposed to heavy and expensive batteries) while they allow the electric engine to perform where it is at its best -- when a lot of power is needed and for regenerative braking. Thus the gas engine can be much smaller and operate at max efficiency RPM as opposed to max power rpm.
I would not be so sure that the US car companies arent in a conspiracy, however - they have no good hybrid or electric offerings. GE had a great electric car and decided to kill it, and actually took back all cars from their customers.
Ok I have to say this the parent is WRONG.
I don't mean to hurt your feelings, mr. Prien, but I just want to make sure nobody follows your advice, because they can get in trouble. You are liable for infringement regardless of whether you were aware of the patent or came up with the invantion on your own.
However, the ammount of money that you need to pay may depend on whether you knew about the patent.
Dear slashdot.
Why must you post these stories on the weekend? You have just ruined the saturday of the whole MS marketing department. Now everyone of them has to cancel their plans, log on slashdot and start making posts about how "no OS is secure" and "it is all the users' fault" and "these guys are just trying to scare up some business". And the ever favourite "if Linux was that popular it would have just as many security flaws".
Well that is their job and they do it well, but why must you force them to do it on the weekend? Why can't they be with their families. Even marketoids have lives (I hear).
Some of us already have enough culture without needing the help of various electronic appliances.
This is just silly. You keep forgetting that your closed platform is essentially based on free software (BSD). The only reason it is closed is that those folks at berkley chose not to use the GPL, and thus allowed others to incorporate their code in closed source projects.
Compare OSX whith the previous mac OSs (which in my experience were the most unstable OSs that are commercially available) and then you will see what a difference open source makes and whether open source innovates or not.
As far as the hardware: aside from the IBM cpu most mac hardware is standard off the shelf PC struff. I.e. it is not that closed either. Again, when macs used to have more prprietary hardware they lagged pretty far behind standard PCs in performance.
It is just great that various entities that I hate get together like this. It makes it so much easier for me to avoid them.
Like now -- I am already avoiding iPods like the plague, but wouldn't you know it, soon while avoiding iPods i will also be avoiding U2 and Bono!!! It's like I am getting the U2-Bono avoidance for free!!! Isn't modern marketing great.
And lets face it -- it is a match made in heaven -- both Bono and Apple are overhyped, attention craving, spineless moneysuckers that annihilate true culture any place they throd.
"p.s. the ozone hole is smaller this year. too bad nobody saw fit to put that in the newspaper."
Which surely happened because the industrialized countries stopped using ozone damaging substances. It was a rare case where they actually did listen to the scientists.
Even if the icecaps melt and the earth gets flooded, people would still say "I don't think we have enough evidence" and "The earth used to be this hot a billion years ago, so stop complaining" and "These scientists are just trying to get more research funding", and "It's just a natural phenomenon we can't do anything about it"
It is amazing how people will ignore the whole scientific community in favor of several more pleasant sounding lies told by opportunistic politicians.
"Macs come with an OS that Linux can't begin to hold a candle to."
Oh, not the old BSD vs. Linux argument again.
Please tell your professor he is an idiot.
"When is the last time the SEC or a Certified Public Accountant identified a case of major corporate fraud before the scam was so far gone it sent the company to court and probably bankruptcy?"
When dod the police catch on a planned murder (or other crime) before it is actually comitted? -- very very rarely. So should we disband the police? Or should we consider that even if they are too late to prevent a crime punishing the criminal provides justice and prevention to other criminals.
The answer is to make the SEC better and not to disband it.
"The SEC was established in the 1920s, yet there have been numerous major stock market crashes and other scams at regular intervals since, and just as many high profile corporate bankruptcies. "
Actually if my memory serves me correctly, it was established in the 30's when securities act was passed. It was established in response to the great depression and there has not been another great depression yet. Furthermore, while there are numerous examples of fraud that is not caught by the SEC, we no longer see the obvious fraud that used to happen during the robber baron ages.
"who do not scrutinize firms in the detail they should"
Scrutinizing firms in higher detail will not necessary prevent fraud. The only thing investors can do is check financial statements for inconsistencies, and the financial statements are entirely created by management. So a dishonest manager only needs to lie consistently in order to escape the deepest scrutiny.
So what is the alternative? That investors become spies and actually go to the company's offices and check on things? Well if you believe that, then 99.999% of current stock owners will not be able to invest properly, which means that the market will crash, capital will become 10x more expensive and our economy will disappear. I would rather have the SEC.
"But they are badly mistaken, the protection offered is nothing but a rubber stamp on an audit report."
Actually the protection offered should be much much greater because auditors are personally liable for any losses resulting from their lies (or screw-ups). And auditors usually have a lot of money. The only problem is that the system is so fraught with corruption, that the auditors responsible for the Enron case, and other similar disasters have been largely able to get away. For the Enron case, the DOJ dragged their feet and let Andersen consulting burn all their documents, destroying all evidence.
Again the solution is getting rid of corruption, not doing away with the system alltogether.
So, are you a troll or a complete moron. I read your past posts and still can't decide...
That is a known psycholigical issue. People have problem dealing with very large (or very small) numbers.
Many have learned how to take advantage of that. Take the lottery, if you calculate the actual chances of winning against the prizes, the lottery is usually a bad deal, but most people do not notice this because the chances of winning are very small and the prizes are very big, and people just dont know how to deal with these numebrs.
If you have ever listened to a popular radio station in the US you would know that theyr playlists consist of about a dozen songs that repeat over and over again.
Leave it to MS to copy the most annoying feature of radio.
So anyone with a high quality color printer can print them?
they probably had their code written by a poor teenage girl in honduras who was getting whipped by a mean guard while she was trying to compile. I can just imagine it:
"more linking errors??? You are going to get it now BITCH!!!!" *whip* *whip*
But I hate it that they always initially refuse these things. It's like you have to make a big deal out of it in order to get your money back. Or, in other words, the store takes advantage of people that are too polite too nice and/or too busy to make a scene.
then again is there that much of a difference between transexuals and church goers? Probably not.
If you do not like spam, please stop spamming slashdot.
Then why is it called "FS" ??????????
since that file system will probably break compatibility with everything non-windows it's delay is good for everyone.
I wonder if they will decide to use it to lock out any third party application providers they dont like.